Friday, 22 February 2002

At the risk of sounding like an uber-geek, I was thinking about how to describe emotions properly. There should be some sort of absolute reporting mechanism so we can accurately convey how something feels, it should be possible to say to someone

"and then the pipe burst and my favourite T-shirt was ruined and I felt like X"

and for them to be able to think,

"well I felt like X too when I was eating a slice of toast and my teeth fell out in front of the padre, so I know exactly what that feels like"

without resorting to a whole world of wild gesticulation, adjectives like dreamy, whirling and wild, and the all too common response of "I know" when they clearly don't.

In the world of design and techy things and what not, colours are specified using a set of numbers called RGB values. Any given colour can be described with three numbers detailing the amount of Red, Green and Blue in the colour. So (0,0,0) is black, (255, 255, 255) is white, and there are gazillions of colours inbetween (actually 16 777 216). In the same way it should be possible to describe an emotion in terms of AJF (anger, joy, frustration) or JLH (jealousy, love, heartbreak) or some such combination of provably perpendicular emotions.

In such a scheme our imaginary protagonist could describe X rather accurately.

Of course the reason that RGB values work so well for colours is that everyone can point stupidly at a red brick wall and agree loudly that it is indeed the finest red they have seen and should henceforth be the benchmark for redness (255, 0, 0). Whereas when your dog gets run over, there's little left to point to (other than a crumpled and sorry heap) so that you can agree with others quite how depressed, strangely serene and angry you all are.

Then there's the problem that the magic of science can prove that red is as red as red can be - (255, 0, 0) rather than (125,0,0). Whereas when you're angry, how do you know that's as angry as you can ever get? How do you know that just because your boss dumped you in it at the last minute you're as full of anger as possible, precluding the possibility that someone could come along and smear jam on your beard thus elevating your burping volcano of fury to a planetary cataclysm of rage?

So we're back to words like maelstrom, float and spiralling. Curses, another near flawless scheme for improving the world left in tatters.

and I've got to be able to write an award-winning book about it all at the end of the year so that I can retire.

Notably, all the books listed above start with a drunken bet - when I got drunk on Saturday night the only bet I made is that I could get a 6-pack in 6 months. The best suggestion so far has been to try and do some silly sayings or proverbs like selling sand to the Arabs. Any suggestions gratefully received at the usual e-mail address.

Tuesday, 12 February 2002

Like an overexcited child, I got back on the rollercoaster and was sick again.

I'm embarrassed to admit to all this after the continual beating I receive from everyone when they've read this site and tell me how stupid I'm being, but I suppose I should stand up and take it like a man.

I went back to her.

More accurately she came back to me. She spent two or three weeks crafting a long love letter to me, splitting up with him (over the phone) and trying to persuade me that I was the love of her life, I was the one that made her happy, I was the one she wanted to be with.

She did a very good job too. She even went to the effort of giving me all the photos she had of them together and all the letters he had sent her (although I didn't want anything to do with them) so that I would truly believe that she had written him out of the book of her life. So, predictably, I succumbed, and we were 'officially', if tentatively, going out with each other again.

Then, equally predictably came the earth shattering lurch, and this time a mere five days later.

On Saturday she had to meet up with him. He had come back to the UK for work purposes and she needed to see him to get her flat keys back so that she could give them to me. And to be fair, I wanted her to see him too, I wanted her to trust herself, to meet him and know that he was behind her, that way I could learn to trust her again.

I had a nervous phone call with her at 10am as she was on her way to meet him, and then....nothing until 8pm. Then she phoned, told me in her small, pathetic, put-upon manner that she couldn't leave him, that all the things she'd said just one week previously had changed, I was secure but not exciting, fun but not exhilirating and that he was the one for her.

If she was a man she'd be accused of thinking with her cock.

I went absolutely ape, screaming, swearing, shouting - a refreshing difference from my normal acts of resignation - I read her letter back to her, I implored her to walk out of the door and into a cab. None of it worked, she's with him now.

Scarily, now, 4 days later, underneath my still bubbling anger, I'm feeling really sorry for her and I want to help her. She's trapped by actions she executes but feels she has no control over, her entire life is being dominated by forces she generates but can't tame. I think it's slowly pulling her apart and it's not pleasant to watch. On Saturday night I was willing her to come to me for her sake as well as mine, to prove she could master herself.

I'm feeling calmer too. I can't take her back now, it's impossible to consider (there's a lurking "unless she...." somewhere, but I can't pin it down) so I can just get on with getting my life back together, and I was doing pretty well before she came back, so it won't take long this time.